php4 Vs php5 : What version of php do you prefer?

Well I think this is a good subject for a debate.

I know that php5 supposed (or is) better than php 4, but for many reasons people still use php4.

For example I have many of my sites running in php 4 because they are not working fine with php5 (actually they need some small code changes to make them work)

If you want my opinion, php 5 is much better as there are many new functions added, the new zend engine make the scripts run must faster, and for the first time there is true OOP functionallity.

I have done three projects till now using php OOP, and I am very happy with it, but I am not sure how fast is this way.

Yes, a lot of sites are coded with php4 because the new features of php5 are mostly for the more experienced programmer. Another problem is that some "out of the box" server configurations doesn't support php5 (f.e. ensimPro).

I think writing "save" applications with features like private and protected methods and vars, abstract classes is not nessacery for the most of the projects.

Next big enhancement is the XML support, this is a big improvement which is usefull for a lot of projects.

Yeah that's true.

But I think that there is some work to be done too.

php 5 when first released was full of bugs, but now works much better (at least I haven't found any bug till now)

I think that php is now in a new era. They are done with the 'easy programming' thing and they start making more progress to whatever an experienced programmer wants.

In anyway php is the best web development programming language (I realized that the other day that I had to do some work with perl.... :) ) so the future can bring only good things.

I don't know about the bugs because I started with php5 a year before (but I heard about).

I think its usefull to use all the new OOP features in every application because its a good training. And the most important its much easier to use other php5 applications and classes.

... yes of course php is the best web programming language. The best thing is that the most php4 code works fine with php5...I test all version 4 scripts on a php5 testing server.